very size of things . . grips mind with an overwhelming sense of power Blast furnaces, eighty-, ninety-, one-hundred-feet tall, gaunt and insatiable, are continually gaping to admit ton after ton of ore, fuel, and stone. Bessemer converters dazzle eye with their leaping flames. Steel ingots of white heat, weighing thousands of pounds, are carried from place to place and tossed about like toys. Electric cranes pick up steel rails or fifty-foot girders as jauntily as if their tons were ounces . . . The display of power on every hand . . . is overwhelming. So wrote an observer of in 1910, describing city which had, through production of steel, become the hearth of nation.l And steel meant men's work. As Elizabeth Butler observed in 1909: Pittsburgh as a workshop for women seems a contradiction in terms.2 With steel as Pittsburgh's economic base, city's population increased from 343,904 to 451,512 in decade between 1890 and 1900. By 1910, had over 533,907 inhabitants and Allegheny County, closely tied economically and politically to city, had a population of over one million. Almost half were women and, from census reports, one receives impression that there were few work opportunities for women. By 1920, only 28 percent of women were wage earners, well below national average. Studies of working-class women in at turn of century show women tied to their homes because of demands of housekeeping and scarcity of employment opportunities. The situation seemed to continue into 1920's.3 The steel industry and city growing around it had attracted thousands of immigrants bringing diversity to older English, Scotch, Irish, and German families. By 1910, over 62 percent of city's population was either foreign born or born to foreign parents. Poles, Slovaks, Croatians, Serbs, Italians, and Jews crowded into city looking for work. According to census, single immigrant women worked outside home as did unmarried American-born daughters of foreign-born parents who often left school early to take jobs in order to supplement family income. However, foreign-born married women were less likely than native-born American women to work outside homes.4 Almost 75 percent of immigrant women were married, less than 4 percent of them worked at wage labor. Thus, picture emerging from census is of daughters becoming wage workers, while mothers contributed to family economy mainly by traditional housework, seldom joining work force. An oral history study recently completed in presents a totally different picture of these women and documents a great variety of work done by married women that is totally absent from census data. Interviewers tape-recorded life histories of seventy-five ethnic grandmothers (twenty-five Italian, twenty-five Jewish, and twenty-five Slavic) born either in Europe or in United States to immigrant parents between years 1886 and 1910. Their varied work experiences indicate that some began to perform economic functions as small children in early years of century. Not only as single women but also as married women, many continued to play an important economic role in their families.